When the employer-review site Glassdoor.comrecently designated Dish Network the country’s worst employer, the CEO’s remarks on the topic weren’t particularly confidence-inspiring. (He called the worst-employer label “ridiculous.”) When a site like Glassdoor totes up the reviews on thousands of different employers and tells you your employees and former employees hate you best of all, that’s a time to take a look in the mirror. To call the Worst Employer designation ridiculous is to say “Those employees don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Ironically, the comments beneath the Denver Post story on Dish’s unwelcome new title share horrendous stories about bonehead management moves and talent-repelling policies in place at Dish. Here’s what Dish Network CEO Joe Clayton doesn’t understand, quite yet: he doesn’t understand that he can’t control public opinion. He can’t control the media, and he certainly can’t change the perception of employees who have suffered under Dish’s policies and culture.

Online commenters and Glassdoor reviewers are more powerful in constructing Dish Network’s employer brand than poor Joe himself is. He says he’s going to launch an employee survey – but dude, the employees have already spoken, and you called their feedback ridiculous! What could we outsiders and prospective Dish customers expect from you as a cultural turnaround expert when you tell the many people who have already voted on Dish’s toxic culture, “Your experiences and views are ridiculous.”?

PR people used to have to worry about their clients’ and employers’ boring new-product announcements. They used to have to worry about their attention-deficient CEOs’ ever-changing attractions to new shiny objects every few days. They used to worry about fuzzy strategies that translated into fuzzy PR plans, and about overwhelmed journalists ignoring their pitches. PR types still have to worry about all these things, but they’ve got a new headache to deal with now: they’ve got to ensure that an organization’s Employer Brand — the brand that no one talks about until, as in the case of Dish Network, the shiz hits the fan – doesn’t derail their best customer-facing, business-community-facing and shareholder-facing PR efforts. All of a sudden, the back door — make that the employee entrance — is open, and people can see in.

Glassdoor and other employer-review sites make an organization’s internal culture more visible to the outside world. All of a sudden, we have to ask ourselves whether we want to get our satellite TV service from a company that treats its team members like galley slaves. (I’m not saying that Dish does that. Never worked there.) I’ve wondered over the years, as a 25-year HR person, why VPs of Marketing and PR chiefs never worried more about (or dug deeper into) their firms’ employer brands, and now the backdoor chickens are coming home to roost.

Isn’t it ironic that a large employer spends millions on customer-facing branding and PR, while still treating prospective employees like cattle via obnoxious Black Hole recruiting systems and brutally bureaucratic auto-response messages? Didn’t anyone running the Marketing or PR engine inside those companies see the inconsistency before? The same companies whose TV ads scream “We’re just folks, come and do business with us, or just mosey on in and sit a spell” don’t hesitate to force would-be employees to grovel in their awful selection processes. They subject job-seekers to weeks of radio silence or they change a job spec mid-stream or they string things along for months before sending off a terse boilerplate offer letter via email (lowball salary offer included at no extra charge). Do these people think that the folks who might use their products and services don’t job-hunt, or don’t have family members and friends who do?

The Dish Network debacle comes at a great time, to wake up Marketing and PR leaders — not to mention CEOS, the rest of the C-team, Board members and shareholders — that there’s no difference between market-facing company branding and talent-market-facing employer branding. We’re all people. We all count. If Glassdoor reviews help make companies better places to work (and more compassionate recruiters of talent) then it’s worth a few sharp blows to the ego for guys like Joe Clayton. He’ll have a great turnaround story to tell, if he can lose the “That’s ridiculous!” posture and actually hear what his teammates are telling him.